I think this is a great base recipe that just needs a couple tweaks. I boiled my pasta separate and added it in towards the end. I added about 1/4 tsp pepper, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1/2 tsp garlic powder to the meat mixture (and only used 1 15-oz can of diced tomatoes although after adding in the pasta I wished I'd used both, it needed a little more "sauce"). I added the pasta and the 2nd cup of cheese at the end, covered, turned the heat off and let it melt together. Yummy!

Reviewer:

Wow, nobody else has reviewed this in over 5 years. Like the previous reviewer, I'll also give it 3 stars. It was okay, but nothing special. I made it exactly as written, except that I didn't think I had a skillet large enough, so I cooked it in a large pot (the same one I usually boil pasta in). The minced garlic I used was the dried kind (as opposed to the kind that comes in a jar packed in oil or water), and the oil I used to saute the onion and garlic was extra virgin olive oil. Because the recipe didn't call for stirring the dish while cooking, and because there was so little liquid, I also found the pasta a little underdone, and clumped together. So I made this a second time, this time adding a half cup of water to the initial mixture. I stirred the dish for the first 20 minutes, as the noodles softened up, and then I added "the rest of the cheese" for the remainder of the time. It came out a bit better, but still nothing spectacular. Maybe fewer noodles, or cooking them before adding them to the dish, would result in a better recipe. The pasta and the dryness are the main issues - the taste per se is pretty good otherwise.

Reviewer:

This was okay but the amount of liquid called for is not enough to cook a pound of pasta. I added a cup of water and that helped but it diluted the taste. Maybe you should use half the amount of pasta or double the sauce.